Interview to Giuseppe Stampone by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio

GiuseppeStampone: Mine is a conceptual approach, for me art is a language, I am interested in the time-space within which the work manifests itself today with the “dilation of time”. In the era of globalisation I am interested in recovering the concept of “Doing”. Not as a mannerist choice, but as a conceptual one, as a process. Doing (giving shape to one’s own thoughts) implies a time of realisation that has us recover our intimate time set against the speed imposed by the market, by the internet and by the new global village. Warhol defined himself as a machine, I define myself as an intelligent machine that though only makes one copy. I work at the choice of the global image from internet but with the desire to possess it uniquely, as a unique moment. This is possible in the fleeting moment of carrying out the appropriation that is no longer an appropriation of the image, but the appropriation of the time of the image, in the making of it. I am for the recov-ery of the “made in” of the Re-doing. Craftsmanship is no longer a manner-ist fact, but a conceptual one. If you make a beaker and you take a second (in China or in any other part of the world) and in some other place they take six months, those six months imply the time for discovering the history of that object, that memory; for getting to know the material but aboveall for rendering quality via the “the right time dilated towards the formulation of the thought” so to speak. Hence attention, a dilation of time, is today the true Anarchy against the dictatorship of this new frenetic, speedy and obsessive time-space, and the return to recovering one’s own intimate time.

D. P.: Is that your way of trying to subtract yourself from the bombard-ment-flow of the crowd of images from our hypermedial world?

S.: How do I manage, if I am bombarded everyday by millions of

images, to understand the contents of the same, if I don’t have the physical time to read them and to pause? As an intelligent photocopier I draw liquid, iconic files from the internet, and copy them just as they are. Recopying them exactly as they are I turn the manner into concept, because redoing the file aboveall turns an iconic image from liquid to solid: a file that you could print out the world over I redo it as a one-off, drawing it with a bic pen. A Mao, a war, or other social dramas of the world. I am not interested in dealing with historic archives, but I want to create some current and contemporary ones, archives that narrate my times, my personal experiences and not those of a bygone generation different from my own. With this I want to catalogue contemporary archives.

D. P.: Is this slowing down enabled by your use of the bic pen, like a form of contemporary oil painting?

S.: Yes indeed, each drawing contains from 20 to 32 stratifications, bic pen veils; the veils used by Raphael or van Eyck in oil painting, I do the same with the bic pen, creating overlapping time-spaces. Day after day I continue to add new layerings: hour after hour, day after day, month after month. I am interested in the final result, I mean in the process made of dilated time-spaces that give shape to thought, because it is the process that creates the drawing: 32 or 25 veils imply a time of completion that I call dilation in time, regaining control of one’s own time. It is the artist who does not accept the speed of internet, of that file on the internet, but I make a copy of it the way a Gothic manuscript miniaturist would have done in the 14th century. It takes two, three, even four or five months to make a file, so making it is no longer mannerist but conceptual: it implies the stretching out of time, and is my genuine dis-obedience to the speed of the internet and globalization. What I want people to say in 100 years is while every-body else had a phallic erection, while everybody had to produce a hundred thousand photos, Stampone decided to remain in his studio, copy this file again and again, day after day like a monk, because it was a conceptual exercise to regain his own intimate time. Which is why I use a bic pen: because it contains a certain amount of oil inside it, and allows me to return to work day-after-day and create time-space stratifications.

When I create my drawings I have two types of work: intelligent photocopiers and historic activations.

D. P.: Hence in your case one could speak of a contemporary past?

S.: Indeed the second reason I use the bic pen is that of the reinterpretation of historic paintings in a contemporary light. For example the Raft of the Medusa, that I presented at the Biennial of Migration, brainchild of Jan Fabre, at Ostend in Belgium, is a smaller version of that painting, measuring 30×40 centimetres. In the Raft of the Medusa Gericault represents the failure of both the Napoleonic Empire and of the French Revolution, with the France of the time being at the mercy of the waves. Indeed, as you rightly point out, in this historical painting I saw an image of today’s migrations. I see a Europe that is lost on this raft, losing an opportunity among these waves, and displaying its inability to save its present.

So I took some pictures of migrants landing in Lampedusa, I cropped out the people I was interested in and put them on the Raft of the Medusa in place of some of the historical figures, all thanks to the perspective that in fact allowed me to amalgamate things in a single vision and form two different time spaces; that of the post French revolution Raft of the Medusa and the current and contemporary one of the landing of migrants on Lampedusa.

D. P.: A perspective re-enactment?

S.: Yes indeed, thanks to perspective I was able to reallocate past his-toric facts to the present, cancelling out the time-space. Like Piero della Francesca in the Flagellation of Christ (where he combined the death of his contemporary Oddantonio and the flagellation of Christ). In my Raft of the Medusa, I did the same thing, unifying an event that did not take place in my time-space, with one that did. That is to say, I unfreeze hypertexts.

D. P.: Thus this contemporisation of history allows you to use art to broach one of the hottest issues of the moment, that of migration and the destiny of Europe?

S.: Which is why I did it on the concept of the Raft of the Medusa, but also on Christ derided, and on the birth of Europe (Europe versus Europe) with the work of Rembrandt, where I turned his Abduction of Europe into this new vision of religious war. Here too with the use of the bic pen I allow myself to return to and re-elaborate on the stratification of time-spaces, that then, combining things together, dilate today’s time, featured by internet and by globalisation. Hence it can certainly be considered contemporary criticism.

D. P.: The same as you do with the work Why are the heavens every-body’s and the earth not?, title drawn from a phrase of Gianni Rodari, where you recontemporise the polyptych

named after Donna Brigida dated 1492 by Niccolò Alunno preserved in the Church of San Niccolò in Foligno?

S.: Yes, here the relation between power and sovereignty are

highlighted. All my works, I being the son of emigrants, are more ethical than aesthetic in the matters they broach, even if for me all art is politics, but not in a descriptive sense. For me, who believes that art is first and foremost language, Duchamp’s urinal, or Fontana’s famous gash, is more political than a didactic representation of violence. For me adopting historic paintings does not mean quoting them, but contemporising and up-dating them as I did with Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa. Here as well as figuratively contemporising the polyp-tych in question I will accompany it with some empty frames (white so that they blend into the wall of the gallery onto which they are directly painted) with only a caption beside, of significance to me, that conceptually provide the mental structure for my 3D works that will be positioned above the same. It is as if to say my works are created thanks to these concepts contained by works done in history by great artists who were decisive in my artistic training, like the already cited Raft, or Liberty Guides the People by Delacroix, Pellizza da Volpedo’s Quarto Stato, Picasso’s Guernica, We Are the Revolution by Beuys… These are past events updated to those of today’s, an operation of remastering via perspective using the bic ink technique, a medium used the world over.

D. P.: In what way do you relate to the use of the bic pen made around the world and particularly in the art of Boetti, Fabre and Ima Blank?

S.: Boetti has a more detached

approach, he conceives the work and controls it at a distance, having others execute it, while Jan Fabre is emotional, gestural. I position myself in-between, inasmuch as I don’t have the emotionality of Fabre, but neither the detached conceptualism of Boetti. I have to create the work, I have to put my hand to it, because I have to be the master of time, dictate time, dilate it, make it become unique.

G .D. P.: What do you mean by mak-ing one-offs of reproducible images, is it because your works arise from your encounter with reproductions and not from your encounter with the originals?

S.: Because I am a child of my time, born first with television and then with the internet, hence also when I did the show with 100 portraits of contemporary artists at GAMeC, I defined myself an “intelligent photocopier”, because I took the images from internet and I retranslated them into one-off portraits with the bic pen. I play on the icon of reproductive recognition that I render unique. More in general the images I make unique have to in some way be iconic and historic.

D. P.: This comes with your obsession for the Renaissance, why?

S.: Because the Renaissance, as has by now been established, is seen as the launchpad for everything that developed after it. One goes from the mechanical arts to the free arts, from the craftsman to the intellectual. I am particularly bound to two instruments that appeared in the Renaissance: one is perspective, the other Gutenberg’s typeface. I define Gutenberg’s typeface and perspective the two most dangerous weapons of total destruction created by man. Perspective deprives man of his empirical experience: it defines existential

space allowing it to be conceptualised. Within the perspective

Renaissance painting, reality is no longer an oral tale passed from parent to child, but a political vision dictated by the patron or client. Gutenberg’s typeface is the same thing, because it transforms the human experience to ones own convenience.

D. P.: But in your love of perspective, for the slowing down of time through remaking, the continuous veiling, doing, making, remaking, is there not a risk of drawing satisfaction from aesthetic excess?

S.: It is not really a matter or aesthetic gratification, more of physical enjoyment, because the moment I draw I slow down my time, in front of internet and globalisation I react recovering my intimacy, I re-acquire my intimate time, also in this way attaining mental gratification. This is why I use the terms of physical and mental enjoyment, because the dilata-tion in time returns you to – it allows you to become re-acquainted with and brings you back to the archè. And regaining one’s time through dilatation also means regaining one’s life, it means having time to decide, but aboveall to mark out the stages. On this count I always take the example of the tea ceremony: it is a rite that takes its aesthetics from the everyday, from tea-drinking, and raises this act to a work of art. A tea master might repeat the same exercise thirty years over. This very repetition leads to perfection. Drawing, when I copy and perform this daily task, every day, becomes a sort of mantra for reaching perfection. Speaking of the tea ritual the difference between Europe and the East is interesting. Just to think that in the West, in 1400, man wanted to adapt nature to himself, while in the same historic period in the East, man wanted to adapt to nature.

D. P.: At this point one could ask in your case whether the concept or the doing comes first?

S.: It is always the concept that dictates the method. I am neither a

draughtsman nor a painter. I don’t know how to paint because I don’t know how to imagine, and I don’t know how to draw because I don’t know how to imagine. I have never drawn anything I imagined. I copy and archive reality, resetting it in a contemporary manner. It is a sort of post production in which I try to nullify the sequential didactic time-space of history, because history is false, it is political action. I do not believe in history, but I believe in experience.

For this very reason I am driven to nullify the historic slant, this sequential, anachronistic and mannerist didactic. I am a child of television because I was born in 1974, but also a child of internet and hence I want to analyse this world, because I don’t want to be superficial in terms of the image. In the end I am a kind of romantic who takes these files and does not want to see them disappear from the internet, rather I want to render them immortal, defend them by crystalizing them in the uniqueness of my image.

D. P.: Could you be more clear about the idea of the uniqueness of the reproducible image?

S.: I work in series and all these start from an iconic image, a scan, a selection, an interaction with google.

I write iconic words, that lead to an icon search and an icon image archive. I then choose an image that has been part of the collective memory, the archive of the history of humanity, a popular and recognizable image. Not in the pop-political sense, because there is a difference between pop-political and popular: politics is an action done by a few for the many, pop though is an aesthetic form where the spectator merely puts the contents. An image behind which lies a tradition, an identity at a sociological and anthropological level is popular.

I am not interested in political images, I am interested in popular ones, because popular images have a content. Hence for example I chose the cover of Led Zeppelin, or the Sex Pistols, or others, because they are groups that belong to the genre of music and movements like rock, punk, post punk that have modified the history of humanity on an anthropological, sociological and political level, they have modified the internal customs. Hence I go and choose images that according to me have made a mark with the people, with their popularity. I take the contents of that image and with a sort of post production I re-contemporise them. They are political images (like that of Led Zeppelin with the German zeppelin, protagonist of that terrible catastrophe in 1936 in New Jersey). On the other I consider some concepts of rock, punk or post punk music, like the last epistemological rifts after Marcel Duchamp’s urinal.

D. P.: In the show you also exhibit the work related to dictators, part of the Global Education project, in fact this particular dictatorial work is called Global Education/Global Dictature.

S.: My artistic endeavour manifests itself and finds its true synthesis in the concept summed up in the term Global Education that goes from multimedial and interactive installations to monumental projects of public and participatory arts; at the same time I practice the “thinking on making” using the bic pen as a medium with maps and alphabets. My method based on the network of relations, collaborations, connections and sharing develops with the Solstizio network founded by me. Global Education is a meta-project and a “formal experience”, so that anyone can intervene with their own experiences. Given that Global Education is a meta-project of a world in which knowledge becomes evermore connective, I tried to give it meaning creating alphabets in bic pen (the scholastic medium par excellence) that play on topics, tags, symbols and popular images, often concerning historic facts and contemporary news, followed by conceptual maps, slogans, interactive installations and tours of different countries of the world, like those that I organized in occasion of the Kochi and Havana Biennales (2012) and the latest, the Seoul Bienniale of architecture (2017). In these works I invite the public to meditate on fundamental questions such as migrations, access to water resources and war via projects such as Greetings from… (2010 – now), Architecture of Intelligence (2007 – now) Watercolors not to waste life (2006 – 2013), Why? (2007 – now). It is history associated with our own personal stories. These are translated into alphabets, an alphabetic grill of images and words is created via participatory assemblies where it is decided which word will be associated with a given image – for example the image of a gold ingot is associated with the H or H20; the image of Jesus with the S of Superman; etc. – for a new shared alphabet. I use the ABC format because I wish to rectify the dictatorial literacy we have been subjected to. Once the letters are ready I expose them as slogans (ie: Arbeit Macht Frei, 2012; Hasta la Victoria Siempre, 2011; Yes We can, 2012,..). With the same letters I also create tourist guides that break the standardised imaginary of given places bearing paths traced out by the inhabitants themselves. Over 100,000 images go to comprise the dictionary of Global Education, where every image is inserted in alphabetical order corresponding to each single participant. All this comes out of a previous personal experience, inasmuch as the son of immigrants born in a French banlieue, in order to survive I had to avail myself of my own network, an architecture of intelligence.

D. P.: But going on to the work of the dictators that you did some years ago…?

S.: I took the images of the twentieth century dictators from the covers of various national and international magazines of the time and I reset them by redrawing them. As ever they are iconic images to which I added a wording like for example, under that of Mao, I put ‘Made’, to be ironical about ‘made in China’ and so on. I use irony to enter a lot more into meanings.

D. P.: A work that is located in the wake of the alphabets…?

S.: Yes it is a part of the alphabet series, that arises for two reasons: personal and professional. I was born in France and since I didn’t get on well with my parents they sent me to Italy to live with my grandmother. I was five-six years old and I didn’t speak Italian, at school they made me do my ABC, imposing a letter and a word. For example C was the C of casa, but for me house had always been the M for maison and this for me was a violence and a dictatorship. This led me to believe that a single letter, a single definition, should not correspond to each and every image, and hence I make pictures featuring names that seem to contradict them. I ask for a transfigured and participated experience, you’re A is not my A and so on. Which is why I started up the Global Education project some time back, in which in every place in the world I invite them to recreate and design their own alphabets.

D. P.: What occurs though with the work on the Nobel prize awards?

S.: The title of the work is P-W, Peace and War. We are faced with the contradictions of the world and of humanity; we are faced with the contradictions of history. I tried to reveal the rules that establish the func-tioning of the world in a very simple manner, associating the name of the person or the international organization that received the Nobel prize with the country they belonged to. By this small change of point of view one discovers that of 95 Nobel Peace prizes: 22 went to US citizens, thirteen to British, eleven to Swiss, followed in the rating by French, Germans, Swedes and so on.

Hence at this point it is easy to focus on the relation between PEACE Prize and ECONOMIC POWER!. This bear-ing witness to the fact to a state of things where the realty does not correspond to the communication made of the same. Among all these colored flags (all exclusively drawn using bic pens) there are modules with several flags because in given years the prize went to more than one person or international organization, there are 19 entirely drawn in blue (monochrome) that represent the years in which the Nobel prizes were not awarded due to the First and the Second World War and during the cold war. At any rate this work accounts for the fact that in the end this prize was construed in the West for westerners.

D. P.: Can the Abduction of Europe that we already mentioned be con-sidered part of this?

S.: Yes because I recontextualised it analysing the Schengen area. I not-ed that there are the golden residences and the gold visas, meaning that if you have a certain economy and you are not a European citizen you belong to the Schengen area. Hence the movement is not only associated with belonging to a nation and/or Europe but to money. Therefore the work concerns Europe versus Europe and its contradictions. In my Abduction of Europe I cancel out the original family, I insert the city of Beirut in the background, I turn the garden into a black forest, a place of danger, I turn the sea into a sea of ice. An image of danger seen from the eyes of abducted Europe.

D. P.: You worked for many years on the project Greetings from L’Aquila centred on the earthquake that dev-astated the city where you lived and studied for some years. Could you tell us the wherefores of this project, also in the light of the recent earthquake in the Rieti region and in the Marches where everything was a repeat of before, where experience seems to have taught nothing?

S.: I worked for many years on this project, for me one of the dearest, also for existential reasons. Aquila is 25 km away from my parents’ home where I grew up. Aquila is the city where I studied in the Academy of Fine Arts. The project saw various phases and formulations: installations, sculpture, images and lastly a video. Everyone speaks about the Aquila earthquake, a catastrophe that hit me close to.

As I said it was a place where I studied for years; where I have many friends. It is a city to which I owe a lot, where I took my first steps in the world of art and where, perhaps for the last time, I experienced the possibility of an intimate and romantic view of art. I still remember the lessons at the Academy of Fine Art, the first shows and exhibitions held there. The first time I returned to Aquila, after the earthquake of April 6th (2009), it was a disarming experience for me.

Seeing those places again where I once lived completely destroyed, gave me a sense of numbness, almost paralysis, that soon turned into si-lence, respect. Because of this sense of decency my first timid attempt to make a small personal contribution materialised in the gesture to take part in a charity auction, organized by Christies, just after the quake. It was then that I took the first two hundred photos of the ‘red zone’ of Greetings from Aquila. That first nucleus of work then became part of the installation Points of View (2009) shown at Venice, on the island of San Servolo, in the exhibition Il Caos # 1 il Lavoro. Two years after that with Raffaele Gavarro and his family we decided to pass the New Year together and on that occasion he asked me to visit Aquila. We managed once again to enter inside the “red zone”. Walking along via XX Settembre at the point of the ill-fated Student House, we quickly realised that there wasn’t a living soul, then, going by way of Largo Nino Carloni and reaching the Cathedral Square, we began to realise that we had entered a protected zone. We were alone, immersed in a tomb-like silence and surrounded on all sides by iron scaffolding, rigid metal frames, that caged in all the facades of the old historic buildings of Aquila. That day, inside the ‘red zone’, that sense of still residual numbness, but also hope, left me and turned into rage. One should remember that immediately after the quake, there was still hope on the drawn faces of the people. The energy of the people was palpable, but in that moment, in there, I realised that all this had definitively disappeared. There was no longer neither sound nor even a living soul. There was no life left and all the hope and promises had vanished. I thought of Burri who at Gibellina, with his cement fissure casts, had forever cancelled out the remains of former life. Gibellina leaves one without even the slightest illusion. Aquila’s post-human new architecture is a deception. But none of this appears and is disguised by the declarations made via the media by the various politicians, who presented this straitjacket as the right thing, the medicine necessary to cure the sick person, that has to suffer this malaise created by these false promises on its very body and its very soul. Hence at San Servolo I created the work entitled Home sweet Home with two options: the possibility of reconstruction or abandonment. That title was born out of the need to see the things from different points of view without stopping before the facade of the house or the things. At first glance the little house appeared reassuring, joyful, cosy to the spectator. Shifting our viewpoint higher up however, via a wooden footbridge, this allowed the spectator to climb onto a raised scaffolding that surrounded the house, and hence, from that new viewpoint, looking inside through a hole in the roof, one noticed the fact that the fairytale world inside the house had been complete-ly destroyed. All that was left was a switched on TV, that transmitted the images of RAI TV programme intervals with its picture postcard landscapes. Even if they weren’t the usual picture postcard images, but those of the city of Aquila destroyed by the earthquake. The point of view had changed. The flag of our beloved Italy flew from the highest point of the scaffolding, symbol of a dream that no longer exists. The only sound that was left was that of a blank bell, our daily alarm, that every night sounds at three thirty-two to remind us of the abrupt reawakening of April 6th. The music of the RAI TV programme interval that accompanied the carousel of images of the quake with the new landscapes of our Bel Paese, also represented the moment of decision, of reflection and stasis before action. At Aquila the town clock stopped at the fatal hour of three thirty-two in the morning of April 6th 2009. But the phenomenon could dangerously extend to the entire planet. For years now in our country we have been living in this state of immobility and Aquila is only one of many examples, a destroyed city that for a moment has become the spectacular stage of the policies of the G8, of the promises never kept. I created 2500 postcards, taken in the earthquake zone with the wording ‘Greet-ings from Aquila’ that I positioned on large tables on show in galleries and museums, postcards that people could take and send, thus creating a global network. The last work in time on the earthquake in Aquila is a video in which the names of the 309 victims run on a black background, like the closing titles of a film.

A sort of collective video grave, a video gravestone-cum-shrine which begins with the spectacularisation of the tragedy that in the video is represented by the introduction accompanied by the soundtrack of the Paramount film ‘The Dark’, with the disturbing noises underneath that last the length of the earthquake that destroyed Aquila. At the end immedi-ately after that run the closing credits, listing the actor protagonists thanks to which one was able to make the film, who are the 308 victims and on whom everybody has speculated.